This article is more than 1 year old

Pull request accepted: You want to buy GitHub, Microsoft? Go for it – EU

Eurocrats reckon that anti-competitiveness from Redmond would be a massive foot-shooting exercise

The European Commission has given the thumbs up to Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub.

The EU took a look at the deal and concluded that, yup, everything would be fine and dandy.

It observed that “Microsoft would have no incentive to undermine the open nature of GitHub's platform”, something that Microsoft is all too aware of as the future CEO of GitHub, Nat Friedman, admitted “if Microsoft screws this up, we will lose the trust of developers for a generation”

The One Ring from Lord of the Rings

Deeper dive with GitHub Actions: One config file to rule them all and in the darkness bind them

READ MORE

The Commission reckoned that in the field of code collaboration and development environments, MicroGit would still “face significant competition from other players”.

As for if competition would be weakened as a result of the merger, the Commission thought not. It took a look at the chances of Microsoft using GitHub to drive users to Redmond's own development or cloud platforms and observed the simple fact that coders would simply up sticks and move elsewhere, thus devaluing the $7.5bn that Microsoft paid for GitHub.

So, in a statement that we hope does not come back to haunt it, the Commission “concluded that the transaction would raise no competition concerns in any of the affected markets" and cleared the case unconditionally.

And with that, Microsoft has cleared another hurdle in bringing GitHub into the fold. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like